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Category: Music

We don’t choose tragedy but we do chose how we respond to it. Kellie created this short film as part of her “thank you” project, to go back years later and thank all of the emergency and medical workers that saved her son. What really touched my heart was when one nurse said that no one had ever thanked her before.
So here is a thank you to all those medical professionals that work tirelessly to save lives. I know that everyone who you (medical professionals) have helped thought that they had expressed their thanks, and that sometimes in the emotional turmoil of what they are going through it might get forgotten.
I love that she threw them a thank you project and that all of them were able to see 10 years later, the young man that they saved as a baby after the tragic car accident that killed his father.

David Bowie’s death was announced today and I learned something important about him. Not only was he a talented musician and actor, he was also a history maker.

This from the German Foreign Office: “Good-bye, David Bowie. You are now among #Heroes. Thank you for helping to bring down the #wall #RIPDavidBowie”

In June 1987, David Bowie returned to the divided city of Berlin for a concert that some Germans, still view as having helped change story.

In 1977, the year Bowie recorded Heroes, the second of his three Berlin albums, East German border guards shot and killed 18-year-old Dietmar Schwietzer as he tried to flee west across the wall; a few months later, 22-year-old Henri Weise drowned trying to cross the Spree River. Heroes was haunted by the Cold War themes of fear and isolation that hung over the city. Its still-famous title track tells a story of two lovers who meet at the wall and try, hopelessly, to find a way to be together.

Bowie returned for the Concert for Berlin, a three-day open-air show in front of the Reichstag, he chose “Heroes” for his performance. The wall couldn’t keep out radio waves., and there were thousands on the other side that had come close to the wall. So it was like a double concert where the wall was the division. You could hear them cheering and singing along from the other side.

“The mood was one of enjoying forbidden fruit,” Olof Pock, then a 15-year-old kid living in East Berlin, later told Deutsche Welle. “We knew that this was somehow being done for our benefit.”
When Bowie performed on the second night, he began by telling the crowd, in German, “We send our wishes to all our friends who are on the other side of the wall.” He sang “Heroes,” the song he’d recorded in Berlin a decade earlier amid the city’s Cold War fear and violence.

Though “Heroes” is today remembered as an anthem of optimism and defiance, its lyrics capture the hopelessness and desperation of a city divided, friends and family in the East kept apart from their loved ones in the West by violence and terror. The song’s narrator pleads, “I wish you could swim / Like the dolphins, like dolphins can swim,” a reference to the East Germans, like Weise, who died trying to cross the Spree.

The lyrics, remembered in this context, are tragic, each verse ending with the line “nothing can keep us together”:
I, I can remember (I remember)
Standing, by the wall (by the wall)
And the guns, shot above our heads (over our heads)
And we kissed, as though nothing could fall (nothing could fall)
And the shame, was on the other side
The song ends with a plea that eventually things will change, if only for a day:
We’re nothing, and nothing will help us
Maybe we’re lying, then you better not stay
But we could be safer, just for one day

On the final day of the three-day show, East German authorities decided that they’d had enough. Police in areas near the wall, where young East Berliners had gathered to listen, cracked down violently, attacking people with water cannons and arresting some 200. “They kept arresting people, dragging them along the surface of the street. It was like a horror movie. We were enraged,” an eyewitness told Deutsche Welle.

“Many of the eyewitnesses claim that the violent police crackdown on the third night of the concerts … were crucial in changing the mood against the state,” the Guardian has written. East German authorities, by overreacting, had turned the gathering of concert listeners — people who just wanted to hear music — into a subversive political act.

A week later, US President Ronald Reagan visited West Berlin and, standing in front of the city’s famous Brandenburg Gate, called on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”
Reagan’s speech, along with the Concert for Berlin a week earlier, had helped change the mood around the wall, which had stood in some form or another for more than a generation.

This poem says things that my heart knows but could never put into such wonderful words and express so completely. I hope that you love this as much as I do –

That Someone Is Me

By Veronica Hay

Someone is lighting a candle for you today and holding you in the light of that flame which burns brightly for you.

Someone is feeling your pain today, your grief and your sorrow and transforming it into joy, serenity and love.

Someone is thinking kindly of you today in the deep recesses of their own heart and the depths of their soul. Find peace in that!

Someone is imagining you today surrounded by angels, spirits, healing energies, celestial beings, starlight and deep magic and wonder. Wrap yourself in all of that.
Someone is understanding today, the depths of what you have been going through, and is embracing you with deep compassion and trusting in your own profound inner knowing to see you through it.

Someone is holding your hand today and letting you know that you are never alone and never have been, even though there have been moments, when you lost your way and felt abandoned and afraid. You never were!

Someone truly knows today perhaps at a level that you do not yet, that all is well somehow, even though it may not appear to be so. And that there is great meaning and purpose in your life, just by the very fact that you are here in all your splendor. Without you here nothing would be the same for any of us. Know that and take strength in it.

Someone is praying for you today and their prayers are being heard and answered.
Someone is whispering gently to your soul today to keep going no matter what, one day at a time, one step at a time, one inch at a time. We are all celebrating that you haven’t given up and you are making such an immense difference for all of us.
Someone is holding you in the light as things in your world seem to be falling apart and putting them back together for you, in new, miraculous and astonishing ways. Trust and believe in that!

Someone is remembering today, who you really are, and why you came here and reminding you when you begin to close your eyes and surrender, just for a moment, to the truth, to what is right NOW, in this moment, and what can be. Ask for that!
Feel the love, cherish the knowing, drink in the joy, and take comfort and strength in all of it. It is all here for you. Reach for it! Embrace it! It is Divinely Yours!